Henry Waxman hands off the torch

A generation is passing in Congress these days, and with it goes a level of legislative craftsmanship that will be sorely missed by both parties.

Just six years ago, the House and Senate still boasted a solid bipartisan block of 32 members from the huge classes elected in the upheaval of the 1970s. By this time next year, no more than a dozen of them will remain in Congress.

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It’s not that these lawmakers cornered the market on all knowledge or virtue. But they were a bridge back to a time when Congress was more a congress, a coming together. When legislation was written by committees, not the partisan leadership, and when the institution occasionally stood up for itself — and even the American people.

Democrats will feel the losses now most, but for Congress as a whole, the greater casualty is the legislative expertise, even art, that is going out the door. Nothing illustrates this better, perhaps, than the career of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

A new generation of House Republicans cheered when the 74-year-old Waxman, one of the last of the “Watergate babies” elected four decades ago, announced his retirement last month. But most of those applauding would be totally lost in a House-Senate conference committee, the sort of legislative briar patch in which Waxman did his best work.

Indeed, for much of the ’80s, the California Democrat faced a parallel situation to what House Republicans face today: a hostile Senate and White House. But he never stopped trying to engage, and some of his biggest accomplishments were signed into law by Republican presidents with the help of Republican senators.

Ronald Reagan came into the White House wanting to cap Medicaid expenditures. But before he left eight years later, he had signed bills in which Waxman successfully expanded coverage for young children and pregnant women. Again with Republican support, Waxman pushed through the Orphan Drug Law in 1983 to increase the availability of medicines for rare diseases. Landmark AIDS and clean-air legislation followed in 1990 under President George H. W. Bush.

A safe seat back home and easy access to California political money helped his career immeasurably. But Waxman was foremost a craftsman, willing to take the long view and build piece by piece toward his goal.

As top aides to then-Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.), Ari Weiss and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew worked with and watched Waxman.

“I came to respect him as a consummate legislator — someone who knew what he was after substantively and was always in the room when the final deal was cut,” Weiss said.

Lew added: “He was very flexible about how to put things together, ’cause he had a goal in mind and he was playing a long game. … I really can’t think of a lot of people who piece by piece have put together the kinds of complicated and important things that he has, just by sticking to it over a long period of time and chipping away at it.”

Waxman’s work stands out even more now, given the circumstances surrounding the latest turnover in Congress — an upheaval that almost matches that of the ’70s.

When the 95th and 96th Congresses convened in 1977 and 1979, fully half the House members had been elected in the prior three elections. The current 113th Congress comes close to that, with more than 45 percent of its members elected since 2008.

But unlike the earlier generation, these new House classes arrived in a time of such partisan turmoil and anti-government, tea party sentiment that the new lawmakers are not being exposed to the very basics of legislating.

The ’70s generation energized House committees by challenging an ossified seniority system in favor of younger, more activist members. The partisanship today has the opposite effect, favoring a top-down leadership style that weakens the committee system and discourages individual initiative.

“The final product is dictated from the top down. So you don’t get to work the other side of the aisle to get the three votes you might need in committee because you aren’t doing so well on your side,” said retiring Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). “The result is you’ll get more and more bills where you’ll need a morning-after pill to get over the embarrassment of what you just voted on.”

Perhaps the best witness to this change is Rep. Rick Nolan, a 70-year-old Minnesota Democrat who was first elected, like Waxman, in 1974 but then went home in 1980 and came back last year to a culture shock in today’s House. “It’s probably the most undemocratic institution in the country,” Nolan said.

Even old mainstays like the joint Appropriations Committees, which could always be counted on to move bills across the House and Senate floors and go to conference, have deteriorated dramatically.

It’s been more than six years since the House and Senate last debated and conferenced the annual bill for the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services, the very heart of the domestic budget. Nearly half of the House — and certainly well over half of House Republicans — weren’t even in Congress to see it happen.

Of the 15 Senate signatories on that 2007 conference report, fewer than half remain today. And Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) — the bill’s Senate floor manager, who came with Waxman to the House in 1974 — will retire this year as well.

Looking back at the ’70s, most attention is always paid to that famous 1974 class in which 92 new House members, 75 of them Democrats, were elected weeks after President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. Former Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who left Congress last week to become U.S. ambassador to China, was part of that Watergate class. So was Miller, Waxman’s California colleague who is also stepping down this year.

But as important as the Watergate class was, it’s best understood in the context of the ’70s classes immediately before and after it.

From the 1972 elections through 1978, the number of freshmen never fell below 67, for a four-election average of more than 76. Big Republican names — Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, David Stockman, Millicent Fenwick and Henry Hyde — were part of these classes. And inside the Democratic caucus, an already established reform movement was able to capitalize on the newcomers to shake up the House committee system.

“We pulled the trigger, and they were our bullets,” said former Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.) who had arrived in 1969 and been part of building the foundation prior to the newcomers. For former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), elected on the Lyndon Johnson landslide in 1964, the newcomers were a second wind of sorts for House Democrats, who had begun to “run out of steam” after the Great Society dreams of the ’60s.

John Lawrence, a former top aide to Miller and later chief of staff for Nancy Pelosi during her speakership, is now writing a book on the Class of ’74. There was simultaneously “skepticism of government born of Vietnam and Watergate,” Lawrence said, “and a passion to make government work to address national priorities.”

“We were so full of ourselves,” said Baucus, laughing at the memory of one of his early on-camera interviews. It was still overwhelmingly white males, but the regional distribution was much wider than many realize today. And this was a generation that saw itself as more savvy about television, better spoken than its elders, and in a popular phrase, more “JFK than FDR.”